President Obama: Strikes on hold if Bashar Assad turns over weapons

President Barack Obama would put strikes against Syria on hold if Bashar Assad’s regime were to turn over control of its chemical weapons, he said Monday, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that he will wait to hear the president make his case to the nation Tuesday before holding an initial vote on military action.

The moves came at the tail end of a tumultuous day for a White House that appeared to be knocked off-message by Secretary of State John Kerry’s positive response to a question about whether the administration would consider a proposal that would allow Syria to avoid a military strike by turning over any stockpile of chemical weapons.

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Obama: Syria address won't swing polls

Obama said he’s open to — though skeptical of — a potential deal to transfer control of Assad’s weapons. “Absolutely. If in fact that happens,” Obama said in an interview with ABC, one of six he sat for at the White House on Monday.

The president said his team will engage in talks with Russia and Syria. “We’re going to run this to ground,” he told CNN. “And John Kerry and the rest of my national security team will engage with the Russians and the international community to see can we arrive at something that is enforceable and serious.”

These talks, he said in multiple interviews, could be a “breakthrough,” but he said the administration must move ahead skeptically. “We don’t want just a a stalling or delaying tactic to put off the pressure that we have on their right now,” he told NBC.

Though the plan seemed to emerge Monday after Kerry, the secretary of state, mentioned the idea early in the day, Obama said the idea of having Russia intervene to try to get Syria to turn over control of its chemical weapons has been on the table for more than a year.

“This is not new,” he told Fox News. “I’ve been discussing this with President Putin for some time now,” he said, including conversations at last year’s G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, and more recently. “I did have those conversations” last week at the G-2o in St. Petersburg, Russia, he told PBS.

Obama’s interviews — with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, CBS’s Scott Pelley, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Fox News’s Chris Wallace, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie and PBS’s Gwen Ifill — capped off a day of remarks in support of a Syria strike from high-profile surrogates including Kerry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, as well as Rice deputies Tony Blinken and Ben Rhodes.

The interviews also came as the White House continued its outreach to members of Congress, bringing more than 70 to the West Wing on Monday, including most of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Obama had initially anticipated broad congressional support for a strike and said as much in remarks as recently as late last week, but conceded Monday that support isn’t strong. “I wouldn’t say I’m confident” that Congress will authorize action, he told NBC.

Just as Obama’s interviews began to air at 6 p.m. ET, Reid announced that he would hold off on filing cloture until after the president’s speech to the nation, which is set for Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET.

“I don’t think we need to see how fast we can do this. We have to see how well we can do this,” Reid (D-Nev.) told senators. “What we need to do is make sure that the president has the opportunity to speak to all 100 senators all 300 million people before we do this.”

The move could mean the first procedural vote will occur as late as Thursday without GOP cooperation. But Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) could strike an agreement to have a vote earlier, possibly Wednesday, when Reid had earlier predicted the first vote would come.

Obama said he hasn’t decided whether he would go ahead with a strike if Congress voted against it.

“I think it’s fair to say that I haven’t decided. I am taking this vote in Congress and what the American people are saying very seriously,” he said.

If an agreement to avert a military attack can’t be reached, Obama acknowledged that in addition to swaying members of Congress, he also needs to convince the American people — and even some in his own household — that action is necessary.

“I knew by bringing this to Congress that there was a risk that the American people, you know, just could not arrive at a consensus around even a limited strike. Because if you ask somebody, you know, I read polls like everybody else,” he told NBC. “And if you ask somebody, if you ask Michelle, ‘Do we do we want to be involved in another war?’ The answer is no.”

Early Monday, Kerry suggested a potential solution, which Russia and Syria quickly seized on. “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that,” he said, in response to a reporter’s question. “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”

Within hours, Russia and Syria both expressed interest in such a plan, and even before Obama conducted his interviews, the administration said it was open to considering an offer but was “highly skeptical” of the Assad regime’s promises, as Rhodes put it.

Kerry drew some criticism Monday when he suggested that a strike on Syria would be “unbelievably small.” The White House later said that Kerry was contrasting the planned attack with larger military efforts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t think that the phrasing reflects some error, it’s a fact by comparison,” press secretary Jay Carney said. “This is certainly much more limited and a smaller duration and size.”